1. The French Lieutenant’s
W
oman
by
John FOW
LES
Supervisor
Asst. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Zeki
Text ÇIRAKLI
vs. Reality in
Postmodernism
by
Gamze KÖSE & Gül Nihan
GÜRSOY
4. I do not know. This story I am telling is all
imagination. These characters I create
never existed outside
my own mind. If I have pretended until now
to know my characters’ minds and
innermost thoughts, it is
because I am writing in (just as I have
assumed some of the vocabulary and
“voice” of) a convention
universally accepted at the time of my
story:
5. But this is preposterous? A character is
either “real” or “imaginary”? If you
think that, hypocrite lecteur,
I can only smile. You do not even think
of your own past as quite real; you
dress it up, you gild it or
blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ...
fictionalize it, in a word, and put it
away on a shelf—your book, your
romanced autobiography. We are all in
flight from the real reality.
6. This tension, then—between lust and
renunciation, undying recollection and
undying repression, lyrical
surrender and tragic duty, between the
sordid facts and their noble use—
energizes and explains one of
the age’s greatest writers; and beyond
him, structures the whole age itself. It is
this I have digressed to
remind you of.
7. You may one day come under a similar gaze.
And you may—in the less reserved context of
our own
century—be aware of it. The intent watcher
will not wait till you are asleep. It will no doubt
suggest
something unpleasant, some kind of devious
sexual approach ... a desire to know you in a
way you do not
want to be known by a stranger. In my
experience there is only one profession that
gives that particular
look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive
8. Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles,
is not quite the same as the two above. But rather,
what the devil am I going to do with you? I have
already thought of ending Charles’s career here
and now;
of leaving him for eternity on his way to London.
But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow,
allowed
no place for the open, the inconclusive ending; and
I preached earlier of the freedom characters must
be
given. My problem is simple—what Charles wants
is clear? It is indeed. But what the protagonist
wants
is not so clear; and I am not at all sure where she is
